Bankers cause more havoc than coalminers dreamt of
The media is busily commemorating the 1984 miners’ strike that broke the stranglehold of unionized labour. In 25 years time will we be looking back to today as the end of capitalism?
The banks have done more damage than the unions ever hoped for. And they have done it globally. Billions of shareholders’ money has been wiped out with billions of taxpayers’ earnings disappearing down the same hole.
They have brought the world to the brink, forcing governments to save the banks to save the financial system. Even so, the globe is facing the worst recession since the 1930s and the depression might even prove worse than that benchmark.
The banks’ folly has halved the pensions that many people will receive, cost them their jobs and could see house prices lose a third of their inflated values, wiping out many owners’ total wealth.
The reaction to their folly has caused prudent savers’ interest income to be decimated. Many business people have seen the rewards of their enterprise disappear because of the banks’ direct or indirect action.
Even the most radical union leaders who wanted to change the order of the world would have balked at causing such havoc.
The miners’ strike that began 25 years ago was a turning point in the balance of power between workers and employers – though the victims of their actions was the population at large, including other workers who were unable to travel, receive services or heat their homes.
British life in the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by industrial disputes, wildcat strikes, walk-outs, closed shops, ‘days of action’, secondary picketing and the other protests that caused regular inconvenience.
It was union-led industrial action that produced the downfall of the Heath government in 1974 and the Callaghan government five years later.
The miners started the fight of 1984 and they lost it, ridding Britain of union power and allowing in the entrepreneurial age that eventually produced the hubris of the current financial crisis.
Capitalism will no more die because of today’s crisis, any more than unions have died. But it will be a very restrained influence on life for many years to come. We will be paying – literally - for the banks’ mistakes for years and perhaps even decades.
The demise of finance does not automatically mean the ascent of labour again, but there will be a void to fill as the powerhouse of economic and social life. But the banking collapse is even more momentous than the miners’ strike.
In a quarter of a century, the effects of today’s crisis will continue to affect our everyday lives, if only as taxpayers.
